June 9, 2013

NSA’s Global Heat Map. The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). Note: the “2007″ date in the image relates to the document from which the interactive map derives its top secret classification, not to the map itself. (Credit: The Guardian)

The Guardiansays it has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.

The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from U.S. computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013.